Men Don't Think - Women Think Too Much?

When you think about thinkers does Roudin's sculpture of The Thinker come to mind? Traditionally men, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, signified the field of philosophy, the art of reflecting on the world through logic. But what's the other side of that, when men don't think and women think too much or vise versa?

Alvaro at Sharp Brains posted Top Ten Tips for Women Who Lead Men in response to Ellen Weber's challenge for a man to show the other view of her post Top Ten Tips for Men Who Lead Women. His list, especially tip number 2, piqued my curiosity...

"Don’t think too much-we don’t. If we do, we try to find ways to self-talk us out of that uncomfortable state."

Hmmm... What pops into your head? Here's the scene I see... the Cortisol Crank boss at work comes in and takes everyone's head off! He did and said that without thinking, People who work for him are really stressed and yes, emotions taxed. But in some cases, emotions can run rampant...

Interestingly University of Michigan reasearcher, Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, dug into Women Overthink and uncovered fascinating findings...

1. Overthinking is a national epidemic among young and middle aged adults but is relatively rare among older adults: 73 percent of 25-35 year-olds overthink compared to 52 percent of 45-55 year-olds and just 20 percent of 65-75 year-olds.

2. Women are significantly more likely than men to fall into overthinking and to be immobilized by it: 57 percent of women and 43 percent of men are overthinkers.

If overthinking is bad for us why do we fall into the trap of doing it? Nolen-Hoeksema shows why...

The organization of our brain sets us up for overthinking. The thoughts and memories stored in our brains don't sit there in isolation; they are woven together in intricate networks of associations.

When you are in a bad mood of some type—depressed, anxious, just altogether upset—your bad mood tends to trigger a cascade of thoughts associated with your mood. These thoughts may have nothing to do with the incident that put you into a bad mood in the first place, as when a poor job performance causes you to think about your aunt who died last year.

Men and women do think differently, where the anatomy of the brain is concerned. Men think more with their gray matter and women with white matter... Here's why... men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, whereas women have 10 times the white matter realted to intelligence according to University of California research. Their findings suggest that there're two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior by pinpointing these gender-based intelligence areas. Here's how they're different...

In human brains, gray matter represents information processing centers, whereas white matter works to network these processing centers. Men and women typically excel at different types of tasks. For example, men tend to do better with tasks requiring more localized processing, such as mathematics, while women are better at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions of the brain, which aids language skills. So you see why men are more apt to tunnel down into logic and women see more how ideas relate.

Now if the boss could tame his flaring temper and the senior assistant could reign in emotional tsunami's, what's left in the soup?